Germantown may allow current middle, high school students who live in Collierville

Students who live in Collierville and attend Houston Middle or Houston High in Germantown would be allowed to stay there through their exit grade under a proposed busing agreement between the two school districts.

Germantown superintendent Jason Manuel said the agreement has been in discussion for weeks, and he will send a copy of it to the school board to discuss and possibly vote on during Thursday’s meeting.

If approved, Collierville will hold a special called school board meeting at 6 p.m. Friday at Town Hall.

Under the agreement, Collierville would pay $100 per student to help defray transportation costs to Germantown whether the students ride the bus or not. The agreement also would allow Germantown to park its buses on the Collierville bus lot and use the gasoline pumps there.

“We think that the majority of the students want to stay where they started,” Manuel said.

Collierville superintendent John Aitken added, “This does give stability for the families and for their kids.”

If the agreement is approved, it would allow the 600 Collierville students who are in the 9th, 10th and 11th grades to stay at Germantown’s Houston High through their exit grade and the 110 Collierville students who are in the sixth and seventh grades to finish at Germantown’s Houston Middle. The agreement does not include any elementary students who live in Collierville but attend a Germantown school.

All fifth and eighth grade students in Collierville will be zoned to Collierville schools this fall rather than Houston High or Houston Middle.

Other nonresidents — who currently attend Germantown municipal schools will have to apply to stay at their schools through the district’s transfer process. As it stands, the transfer policy only guarantees an accepted student a space for one year. However, that too could change during Thursday’s meeting.

Manuel said there will be a discussion and possibly a vote to also allow accepted transfer students to stay through their exit grades. That way, a student who comes to Houston High School from another municipality for their freshman year does not have to worry about reapplying to the school each year and risk not being accepted due to space.

“We didn’t want that stress for families,” Manuel said.

About 25 percent of students now attending Germantown schools live outside the city limits. Manuel said allowing all of them to stay wouldn’t be as much of a problem at the high school, but it would create capacity issues at the four other schools.

Since the district began accepting transfer applications on Tuesday, Germantown already had received 1,110 applications as of early Wednesday afternoon.

Transfer applications already received from those who live in Collierville and currently attend a Germantown school would be removed from the pile if both boards approve the agreement.

Manuel said is willing to make deals with other municipalities to “grandfather in” current students from other areas as well.

Manuel said bid requests for transportation services have not come back yet, so it’s unclear if Collierville’s contribution would cover the total cost of transportation. Germantown will not charge the students tuition per an overturned decision two weeks ago. The district would get state money for each student, no matter where that student lives.

The potential agreement could free up space for the next few years at Collierville High and Schilling Middle, two already overcrowded schools.

Houston High is just inside Germantown’s city limits and is only about half-mile west of Houston Middle on Wolf River Boulevard.

If approved, the agreement is similar to what Lakeland, which only has an elementary school, will be paying Bartlett and Arlington to bus its students to their respective middle and high schools.